Edward E. Cohen is best known to ancient historians for a short
monograph entitled Ancient Athenian Maritime Courts that appeared
in
1973
(Princeton). Cohen embodies a role of traditional relevance in research on
classical antiquity, but one that is increasingly a rarity: he is a "man
of affairs" who brings his practical, professional experience to bear on
his historical research. Although he received a doctorate in Classics from
Princeton, he has made his living (and achieved to all appearances
considerable success) in banking rather than in academic life. Edward Cohen has
now given us a very fine book on ancient banking, a work that has been
well worth the wait. The configuration of the evidence entails that any
contextualized treatment of ancient banking must focus on fourth-century
Athenian banking, a happenstance that has the effect, on the one hand, of
concentrating the analysis, but, on the other, of risking an engendering
of discontinuities with the scattered non-Athenian data on the classical
economy and on banking in particular.

Interpretations of banking
in
classical Athens are enmeshed in the controversies surrounding the
characterizations of the Attic economy, which involve evaluations of its
affinities, respectively, with modern, market economies and with more
primitive, subsistence economies. This debate, which has already seen its
centennial, has pitted against each other two perspectives, that of the
so-called modernists and that of the primitivists. Marxism has played a
baleful role in these polemics by fostering attempts to segregate
classical economic organization as a servile stage (analyzable only on its
own terms) on the way to capitalism. The Marxist interpretation of the
classical economy is naturally a type of primitivist reconstruction. Yet,
other non-Marxist (and less ideological) primitivist scholarship has also
influenced treatments of ancient banking. Therefore, it will be necessary
to specify carefully the sequence of Cohen's arguments, inasmuch as the
evidence on banking can lead to startlingly different conclusions as the
basic perspective of individual scholars varies. It deserves noting at the
very outset that a parallel work which came to many diametrically opposed
solutions appeared in 1991: Paul Millett, Lending and Borrowing in
Ancient Athens (Cambridge).

After a preface containing some
brief
remarks
on methodology (for more on which see below), the first chapter attempts
to establish Athenian banking within the setting of a market economy. The
definition of a bank deserves noting at the outset: it is a private
business that accepted deposits both with an absolute obligation to repay
and the freedom to profit from their use in loans and investments. Ancient
trapezai 'banks' satisfy the essential (including modern
legal, stipulatory) qualifications to be considered banks. Significantly,
in contrast to M.I. Finley, Cohen holds that banks provided mechanisms for
the creation of "bank money" that supplemented the official "commodity
money" in precious metals. I should signal caution here on one point,
namely that the bankers' activities had any substantial impact on the
money supply (cf. pp. 13-14). We lack sufficient evidence for judging.

Trapezitic banks which emerged from (n.b.: and transcended)
money-changing
typified the elements of the economy that were detached from traditional
social relationships. For all their participation in "advanced" economic
functions, these banks also belonged to a hidden, invisible sector of the
economy. Here Cohen is one of the first to recognize the impact of tax
avoidance. I would have emphasized the influence of this factor even more
for this period (the fourth century) in which personal impoverishment and
declining output for the economy of the whole community were the results
of nearly continuous total war (see also below).

Cohen's second
chapter
explores what he considers the misleading results of an application of
quantitative or cliometric analysis (cf. also "Flawed Cliometrics" in
"Banking Operations" on pp. 170-83). There is much subjectivity in
compiling the dossiers of examples to be compared, e.g. that of the cases
contributing to a calculation of the relative proportions of productive
loans and of those made for consumption. An investigation of forensic
evidence provides markedly different results: although it concerns
seemingly unique situations, the description of their circumstances
entails the widespread existence of certain financial practices that are
poorly attested. Cohen offers as examples the loan of Pasion to Philondas
and Timotheos for the shipment of timber ([Dem.] 49.35-36), the series of
loans of Pasion to a prominent businessman of the Bosporan kingdom
(detailed in Isoc. 17), and a loan of Herakleides to the naukleros
Apatourios so that he could disencumber his vessel ([Dem.] 33).

Next
Cohen discusses the financial context for Attic bankers, emphasizing the
differences of their operations from those classified under modern
categories. He particularly cites the two complementary, polar financial
modes for Attic lending, one maritime and the other internal with
(respectively) their tokos nautikos 'maritime yield' and tokos
engeios 'landed yield', where only the latter is strongly affected by
factors of
time. Their action lay within "a cultural and commercial universe molded
by societal concepts and business realities; an Attic
Weltanschauung
continually being fabricated by the actuality of fourth-century, eastern
Mediterranaean, Hellenic living." Regardless of the influence of social
norms, the autonomy from governmental oversight possessed by bankers was
noteworthy. There follows a fine summary of the transaction-driven yields
associated with maritime lending.

The subject of Chapter Four is
the
predominant role of wives and slaves in the life of Attic bankers several
sections of the chapter provide full documentation (73-84, 101-10) --
which
Cohen traces to an absence of suitable salaried agents. Banks and bankers
were after all equated in common perception and in law, and personal and
bank funds were commingled. The physical assets of banks were
insignificant when compared to the value of the skills and experience of
the banker and his dependents. Thus, special attention deserves to be
given to the distinctive style of succession in control of banks wherein
slaves (perhaps even in preference to a son, as in the case of
Apollodoros) took over from their masters, sometimes marrying that
master's widow or daughter. The bank was a specialized adaptation of the
oikos 'household', an institution very prominent in the pre-Peloponnesian
War economy. Thereupon, the limited liability of masters, the ability of
slaves to be parties to litigation, and the role for citizens as agents of
slave bankers are topics that Cohen next discusses. A similar deliberate
flexibility may have surrounded the civic status of the wives of bankers
(as shown for Archippe, the wife of Pasion and Phormion successively),
with concomitant ramifications for their control of property.

Cohen's
fifth and longest chapter deals with banking operations. The discussion
sensibly starts from the nature of the parakatathekai 'deposits'
which
were held under flexible terms, but, according to Cohen in a controversial
conclusion, were nonetheless returnable on demand. Next for consideration
are the reasons why the deposits were made, such as tax avoidance, a
desire for confidential dealings, the creation of collateral, facilitating
transactions, and the possibility for the transfer of funds. Turning to
the utilization of funds by bankers, the author starts with another
controversial judgment in concluding that banks participated in investment
in commerce. He initially bases himself on an investigation of the
inheritances of Demosthenes and Apollodoros (the latter, less probable, to
my mind; cf. Dem. 36.4-6). He sees the list of loans in Dem. 27.9-11 as
maritime loans mediated through bankers (opposing R. Bogaert). An
appraisal of the rest of the evidence includes a discussion of the role of
calculating risk in maritime lending. The topic of risk-taking in
ancient Greece -- be the risks economic or political -- constitutes a
virtual
terra incognita for ancient historians so that Cohen's remarks
here,
albeit narrowly focused, are most welcome. He conducts a sustained polemic
against the consensus holding against bank financing of maritime loans,
represented here to a large extent by its most recent representatives, R.
Bogaert and P. Millett. All the available cases are evaluated for the
presence or absence of maritime lending. The chapter closes with a brief
description of a thoroughly obscure topic, the status and usage of a
banker's personal capital.

Chapter Six, closing out the volume, is
entitled "The Bank's Role in the Economy". It starts by squarely
confronting the thorny issue of the supposed lack of an economic
consciousness in the fourth-century Athenian. Banking belonged to the
invisible economy -- financial assets were aphanes -- which Cohen,
following
the
lead of work on contemporary "parallel" or "black" economies, views as
playing a critical, constructive
role. The invisible economy buffered the affluent from the heavy burden
of taxation caused by liturgies and eisphorai. Some students of
Athenian
lending (such as Millett) have set the eranos loan, a good-will
collective
loan from friends, as a foil to bank lending: its prominence dramatizes
the continued existence of an embedded economy and the primacy of
communally-oriented behavior over market-oriented behavior. Cohen,
however, argues that eranos loans were part of a single matrix of lending
with bank loans, and they could carry interest and lead to litigation like
other types of lending in the setting of a price-establishing market. A
final discussion deals with bank failures which were owed (according to
the author) to the inherent vulnerabilities of
a business with a high exposure to risks. The alternative view that such
failures arose from general waves of economic crisis is supported by very
scant data. While I applaud Cohen's skepticism toward the "crisis"
analysis that is a hallmark of primitivist and ideological
interpretations of ancient economic life, I would respectfully suggest
that individual business difficulties are likely to have interacted with
politically-grounded shifts in Aegean commerce in the failing of
fourth-century banks.

This work makes an excellent start toward a
new
appreciation of the extraordinary ascendency in business of the leading
bankers. Dealing with a bank put the citizen beyond the realm of the
public, "visible" economy; indeed, its attractions largely lay in its
confidentiality and its immunity from taxation and litigation. Hence the
trust that a banker inspired, perhaps as much as his business acumen, was
a tremendous asset, and it may be that even a slight difference in public
perception of trustworthiness had enormous ramifications for the size and
the profitability of an individual bank. Thus, the slave who worked at the
side of his master and was seen repeatedly to deserve such confidence
(like Pasion or Phormion) was the presumptive heir to the bank regardless
of the legal difficulties which that succession entailed. The social and
political persona of an heir like Apollodoros, the son of Pasion,
may
have
been too complex, too ambiguous to prospective business partners to permit
an intergenerational family bank, and that will have had results for
classical banking that we cannot yet fully appraise.

Cohen's
results are
admittedly impressive, but it is also necessary to acknowledge that he
must utilize a relatively few attestations of banking activity again and
again for the unique light that they shed. One situation invoked
repeatedly is the account of the misadventures of the Bosporan merchant in
Isoc. 17. The plot of the Hellenotamiai in schol. Dem. 24.16 establishes
several
crucial points, and the loans connected with the ransoming of Nikostratos
in Dem. 53 are pressed for what they can tell us. Thus, we ought not to
relinquish substantial sympathy for those like Millett who call our
attention to the number of cases that reveal more personalized, more
"embedded"
aspects of fourth-century economic behavior.

I should juxtapose
this
insight with the following point. The necessarily Athenian emphasis of the
analysis can lead to a fallacious generalization. It may be sensible to
speak of the emergence of a market economy in Athens (for the first time)
in the late fifth (I should stress) and fourth centuries, but the
possibility should not be forgotten that other cities had earlier (or more
thoroughly) achieved an equal or even greater level of economic and
financial sophistication and, in addition, that the more advanced features
of the Athenian economy were assimilated from abroad or introduced by
immigrants during the heyday of the empire. In other words, we cannot
determine whether the testimonia on banking merely
bespeak the intermediate character of the classical Attic economy,
possessing correspondences not only with an agrarian subsistence economy,
but also with a more differentiated and entrepreneurial market economy. Or
is it possible that the unique blend of primitive and advanced features
of fourth-century economic behavior are another product of the
political
economy of fifth-century Athens? Athenian hegemony caused the grafting of
a commercial and entrepreneurial economic component on an economy that had
previously mixed agriculture and mining with craft activity. That
dominance and its achievement had augmented the capital of elite Athenians
through the profits of empire. Hence the mixture of primitive and more
advanced features in Athenian lending and borrowing was marked, perhaps
even incongruous.

The segregation of entrepreneurial activity in an
alternative economy, where it was relatively immune from taxation, may
have constituted another perquisite of elite status among the citizens of
a hegemonic state. If that is so, fourth-century Athenians may have
continued to pay for this "invisible" financial activity that had
contributed to the affluence of their fifth-century predecessors, by lower
revenues, by less ability to supervise banking and commerce, and (most
significantly) by a limitation of the benefits of a thorough penetration
of the most advanced contemporary financial and commercial practices
(which Cohen has analysed so well) into the other sectors of the economy.

The important methodological lesson of this work cannot be over
emphasized. There are bound to exist significant arguments over the
appraisal of the complexity and differentiation of economic institutions
in antiquity, as there will exist disagreements about the capacity of the
ancients to articulate their understanding of economic phenomena.
Nonetheless, this work serves as a powerful demonstration how the lessons
of economic research based on other periods and even on a study of modern
behavior can elucidate the activities of ancient economic agents. As
Cohen observes, "as with other fundamental human drives and functions, the
Athenian dealt with monetary enrichment and poverty, trade and profit in
ways that reflect fundamental human responses and motivations and these
can be as
clear to us as other culturally transferable human drives, emotions, and
acts that we encounter in Greek literature, mythology, and art. The
fundamental processes of money-lending, deposit gathering, and currency
exchange generate human responses to materialistic advantage" (p. xi).